alanjjohnstone
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US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Wednesday Mursi's government "wasn't a democratic rule"."What I mean is what we've been referencing about the 22 million people who have been out there voicing their views and making clear that democracy is not just about simply winning the vote at the ballot box."http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/11/us-egypt-protests-idUSBRE95Q0NO20130711 I'll have to remember that the next time an Occupy type grassroots street protest movement arises in the USA
Strange how American and Hague's allegations of Assad regime's use of chemical weapons get BBC headlines but i fail to see any mention of the Russian Foreign Secretary's on their website. "Our experts took samples on the spot and studied them in the very lab which is certified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and came to the conclusion that both the shell and the sarin it contained were home-made,” the Russian foreign minister said. “According to our additional information, these shells and the substance were made last February in the Syrian territory which at that time was under the control of the Free Syrian Army and made by one of the affiliated armed groups,” Lavrov added. On Tuesday, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations said firsthand evidence showed that militants, and not the Syrian army, manufactured sarin nerve gas and used it during an attack near the city of Aleppo in March. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that Russian experts collected samples at the site of the attack in the region of Khan al-Assal, where over two dozen people, including 16 Syrian troops, died on March 19. http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/07/10/313239/syria-militants-used-chemical-weapons/
A thought provoking article here. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/10/the-end-of-the-leaderless-revolution/ "The end of the leaderless revolution does not mean the end of the Egyptian revolutionary process. But it spells the end of the fallacy that the people can take power without an agenda, an alternative platform, an ideology, and leaders. The leaderless revolution has turned out to be the wrong substitute for the status quo and revolutions that end up in a cult of the leader. What we need is perhaps leaderful rather than leaderless revolutions." "Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented." "When the revolutionaries do not produce ideology, demands and leaders, this does not mean that the revolt will have no ideology, demands and leaders. In fact, Tamarod’s spontaneous ideology turned out to be militarist nationalism, its demand a postmodern coup, its leader the feloul (remnants of the old regime). This is the danger that awaits any allegedly leaderless revolt: Appropriation by the main institutional alternatives of the institutions they are fighting against." "What we learn from this case is that when movements don’t have (or claim not to have) ideologies, agendas, demands and leaders, they can go in two directions: they can dissipate (as did Occupy), or serve the agendas of others." It echoes our position that without the political party and a structured form of democracy and without a clear objective of socialism, the class war is weakened. This has been the root of many of our disagreements with Occupy and their ilk. It is also part of our case against the Left Communists such as the ICC who substitute temporary and transient workers assemblies and strike committees against the permanance of class struggle organisations such as trade union. The author's use of the terms leaderless, leaders and leadership may not be appropriate and could be due to his lack of acquaintance with alternative means and ways of working class self-rule.
An interesting insight into the world of the jihadists.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/10/syria-al-nusra-front-jihadi "The commander talked about the services al-Nusra is providing to Shadadi's residents. First, there is food: 225 sacks of wheat, baked into bread and delivered to the people every day through special teams in each neighbourhood. Then there is free electricity and water, which run all day throughout the town. There is also al-Nusra healthcare, provided from a small clinic that treats all comers, regardless of whether they have sworn allegiance to the emirate or not. Finally, there is order and the promise of swift justice, delivered according to sharia law by a handful of newly appointed judges." "When we bring in cars or weapons, we don't keep them," said the emir: "the money is sent to the treasury, which distributes these resources." Back at the oil company headquarters in Shadadi, the workers were discussing their new leaders in the shade of a corrugated metal sheet."We got rid of one despot [Bashar] and replaced him with another," one man told a young technician who had given his oath to al-Nusra, and thereby been allowed to keep his job."As in every place, there are good people and bad people," responded the technician."Why is it all right for you to take all the wheat silos and leave none for others?" the first man asked, bitterly."Because al-Nusra are the best to rule, and we can take care of the wheat," said the technician."Wallah [truly]," responded the man, "al-Nusra takes a cut of everything here – even the air that we breathe." And the future of Syria? "We can't topple Bashar and hand it to the FSA to establish the same apostate secularist state. We are not fighting against Bashar only; we are fighting the system." "After Bashar falls, I see the FSA battalions dividing into three parts. Some will go home to their previous lives, some will join us in establishing the rule of sharia, and a third part will become a sahwa and turn and fight us." More feared even than the threat of an "awakening", is the risk of splits among the jihadi fighters themselves."I expected clashes with everyone: with the tribes, with the FSA, with anyone," he said. "But with other jihadis? I never thought that day would come."
In the context of the thread the lack of material conditions was one explanation given why the Russia of 1917 could not achieve socialism regardless of the good intentions or otherwise of the Bolsheviks and Lenin. Was Russia similar to England of 1847 when Engels wrote, probably therefore his quote was apt. Two other reasons also existed for why Russia could not jump to socialism, one being the issue of lack of socialism in other parts of the world which Celtic himself accepts but which now Alex disputes believing we can have localism or a form of autarky. And your own addition that what is also required is the support of the majority. i would add the caveat …also the understanding of the majority. In 1917 Russia the Bolsheviks did not have the support nor the understanding of the majority. The peasant party of the Social Revolutionaries had the majority, and their programme was probably better understood by the peasantry, hence why its slogans was hijacked by the Bolsheviks. You did refer to a workable majority but the thread's question is can a minority (the bolsheviks) of a minority (the working class) because it controls the political power of the state impose its will upon the majority and create socialism which is the claim of Lenin and Trotsky, using the camoflage of the dictatorship of the proletariat to justify and argue it can. Celtic is influenced by such a case and that is why he repeatedly returns to the necessity of a minority vanguard party (but avoids the consequences of such a position, military dictatorship and rise of a new ruling class) If a majority overthrows the existing state and establishes socilism before the material conditions have been developed it may be described as socialism but not the socialism of free access since society will be incapable of producing an abundance and rationing would be required in distribution. Many religious/utopian movements have advocated sharing freely in the fruits of nature. The early Christian communities to the Diggers. The Material Conception of History suggests that ideas grow from the manner and mode of production, hence the communism of the church was dropped, and not taken up because production was based on private ownership that competed with communal consumption. I suggest if the material conditions are wanting, socialism achieved will be very different from the 19th/20th/21st centuries ideas of what it is. In an earlier message i did in passing remarked on the interesting thought of what if and what could be if these communistic rebellions of the 13th-15th centuries had been successful.
Not the way i read Engels' remark. I interpret it meaning that the West's movement to-wards socialism will be in gradual steps…and the Communist Manifsto written a year or so later, laid down these steps that were required in M and E's opinion in 1848. In later decades this gradualism they decided was no longer necessary – capitalism had fulfilled its task and developed the means of production so that socialism was an immediate possibility, not something far-off in the future. Marx still had reservations upon total free access being practicable as expressed privately in his Gotha critique and support for labour time vouchers as a system of rationing and allocation. I think you are trying to relate the thread to the theory of uneven development which is two-fold,…uneven in the sense of material conditions and uneven in the spread of ideas. I'm no future teller but i do see a situation that once socialism is established we can provide all the material benefits of it to those non-industrialised regions…and by doing so we will be hastening their social ideas over-coming reactionary religious thought etc. Again relating it to the Russian discussion any attempt to establish "socialism" in one country would be bound to fail owing to the pressures exerted by the world market on that country's means of production. Recent experience in Russia, China and elsewhere shows conclusively that states cannot detach themselves from the requirements of an integrated system of production operated through the world market.
SP, in 1847, Engels thought tht the productive material conditions were not sufficient to go straight to socialism and he saw within capitalism , the rise of factories and the concentration of productive forces etc – the means of acquiring the material conditions – hence support for capitalism. Capitalism continued to develop and expand those means of production until they were sufficient to sustain socialism, at least in most of Europe and North America. Therefore the answer is Yes, as Adam said, we can go directly to socialism now. This argument arose from the question of if socialism was achievable in 1917 Russia or did it too have to go through the development of capitalist production. Could Russia miss out the capitalist stage and jump straight to socialism? The answer most common from Marxists is "No" unless it was accompanied by a successful socialist revolution in the west which did not occur. There are two different views of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. 1. they were genuine Marxists and the failure of the working class to make the socialist revolution required them to put the Russian Revolution into reverse and adopt capitalism2. They were always state-capitalists and achieved their aim. The German post office being a model. Personally i keep jumping from one position to the other depending on how sympathetic i happen to feel at the time. More likely is that both views were incorporated within the Bolsheviks and also varied in strength and prevalence depending on time and place and events. The 1906 pamphlet Socialism and Anarchism by Stalin has a surprisingly accurate desription of socialism in it . I hazard to guess that Marx and Lenin's view was that a successful popular revolution may raise the morale of the Western workers and increase their class conscioussness, inspiring them to the socialist reviolution and once they are victorious they can come to the assistance of a Russia still in limbo. Neither saw it the other way around of the Russians coming to the assistance of the West's revolution. Comintern's "world revolution" was simply to encourage and mobilise the defence of Russia, one reason why the Amsterdam Section was abolished when it took the world revolutionary ideas too seriously. An interesting side-track is, was socialism possible in fuedalism if all those peasant uprisings such as Wat Tyler did succeed and the aristocracy and the hierarchal clergy are overthrown – Europe-wide. Could a common ownership in consumption sociaty be developed with out the common ownership of production? Engels says no in the German Peasant Revolution book. But it is from hindsight. Good subject for a pub debate.
Might just be me but i think quite a few could accept his view. We aren't determinists, or future-tellers, we can just generalise on what we know and understand at present and that is why we do what we do, but come a mass socialist movement and what the political situation then exists, then the working class will decide on a strategy to achieve socialism, taking into consideration world conditions not necessarily just the parochial British one.
Also SP, In a preface to the Communist Manifesto in 1882, Marx and Engels said:"Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina [mir], though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development". Shortly thereafter, Marx reversed himself, and said it was too late: capitalism had triumphed in the Russian countryside, and Russia was condemned, like all capitalist countries before it, to the bloody road of capitalist accumulation
There is always a possibility of what Marx described as a "pro-slavery rebellion" taking place. It is why the Socialist Party advocates democratically capturing the machinery of the State to bestow legitimacy upon the revolution but also to gain control of the coercive organs of the state thus depriving a recalcitrant minority of its use and instead to deploy it to suppress any rebellion. Realistically such a situation is unlikely in the scenario envisaged by the SPGB where the majority who control all the means of supply and transport are socialists. Once again you appear to accept that the vanguard party safeguards the revolution. In the German right wing Kapp Putsch, it was not the actions of the KPD or KAPD (the German communist parties) that stopped it succeeding but was foiled by the trade unionist general strike called by the reformist SPD. People Power not Party Power.
He wrote it in 1847 when the material conditions were actually physically not ready. His gradualism was incorporated in the Communist Manifesto with the demands to be advocated in Section 2…such as nationalising the banks etc to create the conditions. By the 1870/80S Engels thought the material conditions for socialism were achieved. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific : "The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here." He also wrote in 1872 that the means of production could then have provided "enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund" Perhaps a little bit overly optimistic but by the turn of the 20th century it was much more clear cut, at least in western Europe and North America. Asia, China and India, was a different case entirely since their mode of production was particular to that vast region. We should always remember the constraints Marx placed upon the application of his theories. In the Russin situation he discussed the mir , peasant self-organisation, as a possible means to speed up the transformation of feudalism to socialism without capitalism. It was merely conjecture on his part. Engels explains " The revolution sought by modern Socialism is, briefly, the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and the reorganisation of society by the abolition of all class distinctions…A person who maintains that this revolution could be carried out more easily in his country because it neither has proletariat nor bourgeoisie, proves by his statement that he has understood nothing of Socialism."
You maybe interested in what Engels and Marx has said, Alex. Answering the question in 1847 “Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?”, Engels wrote:”No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity”. In 1847 Marx writes:”If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, that will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1794, so long as in the course of history, in its `movement’, the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule.” [my emphasis] In 1850, Marx stated:”History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production.” Also in 1850 Engels desribes what happens in a premature revolution:Also, writing in 1850, Engels discussed the fate of Thomas Munzer, as the leader of a communistic party coming to power before conditions were ripe for establishment of a communistic society. This passage is worth quoting extensively: “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed, from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in a unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interest of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.” Marx recognised the inevitability of some limitations on free consumption in the early stages of socialism (had it been established in the 1870’s), and endorses “labour-time vouchers” as one possible method of doing this.
We've given you quite a reading list task so perhaps this 5 minute video on Kronsdadt may be a welcome break. http://libcom.org/blog/kronstadt-short-film-24022012 Don't be misled by those apologists who claim that the Kronsdadt of 1921 was different from 1917 in class make up. Simply not accurate. Historian, Israel Getzler investigated this issue and demonstrated that of those serving in the Baltic fleet on 1st January 1921 at least 75.5% were drafted before 1918. Veteran politicised Red sailor still predominated in Kronstadt at the end of 1920. Of the 2,028 sailors where years of enlistment are known, 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution (the largest group, 1,195, joined in the years 1914–16). Other research confirms Getzler’s work. Documents from the Soviet Archives such as areport by Vasilii Sevei, Plenipotentiary of the Special Section of the Cheka, dated March 7th, 1921,stated that a “large majority” of the sailors of Baltic Fleet “were and still are professional revolutionaries and could well form the basis for a possible third revolution.” “In September and October 1920 Bolshevik party lecturer Ieronymus Yasinksky went to Kronstadt to lecture 400 naval recruits and writes “‘in Kronstadt the red sailor still predominates.’ Gramsci says that “to tell the truth is a communist and revolutionary act”. Most Trotskyists argue that the suppression of the rebellion was essential to defend the “gains of the revolution.” What exactly were these gains? Not soviet democracy, freedom of speech, assembly and press, trade union freedom and so on as the Kronstadters were crushed for demanding these.
Another provocative article from New Democracy World and John Spritzler, throwing out the baby with the bath-waterhttp://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1307/S00065/socialism-and-communism-no-democratic-revolution-yes.htmI’m sure he does know better but he chooses to apply popular misconceptions to bolster his case.
What you say is very true. Circumstances in post 1917 Russia dictated Lenin's policies and directed his actions which led to the implementation of a form of capitalism. It led to the dictatorship of the party substituting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the problems were no unforeseen. As Marx explained, you cannot jump from feudalism to socialism. You turn Marx upside down by suggesting that Russia assist the more developed West. Marx specifically described that the only way Russia could possibly miss out the capitalist stage was through the intervention from the industrialised nations. You seem to switch the situation around. The post First World War world situation was indeed radical…general strikes in America and in Canada and elsewhere. Lenin made a judgement call that there was a genuine revolutionary surge and he saw evidence in many movements of this revolutionary fervour. He was wrong. Simple as that. There existed a strong re-vtalised class struggle by workers but organisations and actions he considered to be the vanguard could not bring over the majority of workers to its side. That was reality. That failure of Lenin reading what was really happening and fully understanding the workers consciousness outside Russia, determined the shifting and changing compromising rhetoric of Comintern and the abandonment of world revolution as an objective to be replaced by an accommodation with the Western Powers. 1923 Treaty of Rapallo with Germany saw the Red Army training and supplying German government troops that were used against a workers uprising in Germany (Stalin was not yet in power so it cannot be laid at his feet) However, there were other alternatives to choose from which would have strengthened the working class, not weakened it by removing its independent self-organisation. For all its flaws bourgeois democracy would have been more benefit for the small Russian working class and would have avoided or at least minimised the civil war that you correctly describe as turmoil. The Left Mensheviks, perhaps represented the better option for the urban working class and the Left Social Revolutionaries for the peasantry. We are not going to convince you in a brie exchange of posts as this. It is up to yourself to read the links you have been provided, to Julius Martov and other socialist but anti-Bolshevik critics like Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick.
